“Its thirteen decks of luxury towered over the bleak, flat Arctic landscape,” reports The National, from which this screencap is pulled.

The first luxury cruise ship to pass through the Northwest Passage stopped at a remote Canadian beach town this week and was surprised, for some reason, to find that all the ice had melted. “Makes you think more about the global warming,” one Texan tourist on the ship remarked. Indeed it does.

“No ice yet,” said the tourist who had paid tens of thousands to ride in the massive cruise ship crossing the newly-melted arctic. “Kind of, you know, makes you think more about the global warming and how it’s affecting everything.”

Being surprised that there’s no ice in the Northwest Passage is a somewhat quizzical realization coming from a passenger on this cruise ship, which is literally only up there because there’s no ice to block it from getting there. Certainly cruise ships are not the ones most responsible for melting our polar ice, but the cruise is possible specifically due to climate change. That is the whole thing.

The ‘Crystal Serenity’ is the biggest ship yet to cross the Northwest Passage, making it a metaphorical if not literal icebreaker for swarming, norovirus-plauged cruise ship tourism across the increasingly-open Northwest Passage. There are concerns that these new giganto-boats will overload the small towns and already-damaged ecosystems of the area, as Canada’s The National reports.